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Xenographic writes "Remember all the fuss about SCO subpoenaing PJ of Groklaw, where they allege that she's funded by IBM because she once got a publicly available document from a volunteer at the courthouse a little before it hit the Court's website? That's nothing. Groklaw has evidence that other materials have been leaked in this case — but they weren't leaked to Groklaw, and they weren't leaked by IBM. Information about the sealed materials in question made its way to Maureen O'Gara, who wrote a story based on inside information, displaying a positively uncanny insight into what SCO was planning, including far more than just the sealed document a SCO lawyer read out loud in open court. Interestingly, several witnesses report that Maureen O'Gara did not even attend that hearing, leaving us to speculate about her source."

No, pretty much not. The problem with the moderation on slashdot is that it depends on the same fucking morons who read and post to do the moderation. They don't bother thinking about/reading the articles before commenting, why bother with either when judging comments?

Easy to fix.Require potential moderators to take a pop quiz on TFA before they are allowed to moderate on it.The quiz would determine if they had really read TFA or not. Fail the quiz, no moderation powers, pass the quiz and you can moderate. Sure would cut down on a lot of stupid shit.

As for her 180, there have been campaigns in the past to not buy any rags with her stories in it. Also there has been pushes to inform the management of the rags your dislike of her. I'm not sure if any 180 would because she woke up and smelled the coffee or because she was pushed that way. However sincere, I doubt anyone could/would trust the words coming from her if they knew about her past.

She has been in league with MS for a number of years. No doubt that she will continue to get inside scoops from them for years to come because she did this for them. Keep in mind, that it is VERY doubtful that any of the pro-SCO journalists believe what they are writing. It is just that they are making LOADS of money by doing so, AND earning MS's gratitude.

Keep in mind, that it is VERY doubtful that any of the pro-SCO journalists believe what they are writing.

I'm not so sure. Granted - some particular writers are very skewed. That would imply some sort of hidden motivation (favors / payment or maybe an axe to grind). But I'm inclined to think Didio was simply duped.

Didio's articles didn't have the wild leaps of logic and vitriol you see in, say, Lyons' or O'Garra's work. Most of Didio's claims seem to be the usual rehashed press releases. The most "dam

SCO wants to punish PJ because Groklaw has spoiled their FUD. They can't find her because she's very shy. They try to depose her because then they'll be able to get all her details. The problem is that they need some way to actually connect her to the court cases. So they concoct this story that PJ is a schill for IBM, IBM supports her and IBM feeds her information that should be secret.

I was thinking "Jesus Christ! You put in a wikpeida link for anything http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Anything [wikipedia.org] and you get modded up." Only after visiting the link on a lark did I realise it was actually law related. Those who might be similarly disposed, take a look at the wikipedia links before judging;)

It is true that taking the time to format and submit a link tends to garner mods, especially if vaguely relevant. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Anything [uncyclopedia.org] probably isn't relevant enough to cut it.

It goes much deeper than that. SCO wants PJ's deposition to be taken in the Novell case and be used in the IBM case AFTER the time for depositions in the IBM case has expired. This is another attempt to get claims into the IBM case and waste more time there forcing IBM to answer yet another silly SCO memo. It is an end run around the IBM schedule as well as what you posted.

1) I thought dispostions were to be filed with the court (in some form) prior to them happening. When did they start to "try to depose her" according to court records?

spoiled their FUD

2) I don't think too much should be made of this, otherwise, the FUD continues by having everyone running around in circles and forgets what is really is at the heart of this case. Diversion, I think the word is.Look! there's Elvis
3) Mr "Chair Throwing" Balmer from M$, is beginning to sound like SCO

Part of me thinks that they want to find out who she is so some guy with a middle name of "the" (Mikey the Knife, Jimmy the Nose, etc) can go "depose" her. I wouldn't put it past them... Darl carries a gun!

Since it was a sealed document that O'Gara spoke of, then it must have been either SCO or IBM which revealed it to her...

But IBM isn't that dumb and has much more to lose than SCO by not following procedure. Oh, and did I mention that SCO was the one which attempted to read a sealed e-mail in open court? So I think SCO, in addition to all their FUD, is now on the breaking-rules path.

With SCO's reputation being sh*t, pursuing bogus claims about Unix rights it doesn't even have, facing financial ruin, its officers potentially facing civil litigation for pissing away millions upon millions of shareholder's dollars on this crap, and a handful of other problems, I doubt they really care if they are labeled as hypocrites at this point. It's kind of like a murderer worrying about committing perjury - it can't get much worse once it's gone that far.

I'd pay to see the MoGroll [slashdot.org] having to answer that in court... but I don't think MogTrolls are capable of testifying, since history shows they can't tell the difference between truth and fiction.

Add Daniel "Lying" Lyons, Bob Pretenderlie, Darl McBride and Gregory Blepp with his suitcase and the millions of lines of code... and I can see the judge starting to hand out death penalties to witnesses.

She has. She has repeatedly, and now recently, denied any connection to IBM. She recently explained (again) how she could get court material in the way she did. She has answered the allegations. What more did you want her to do other than completely respond?

Probably have her show up in person, so that McBribe et al. could hire a gang of thugs to make a drive-by on her house when she's back from the court. Remember that she caused them to lose millions, if not billions, of dollars that were rightfully theirs. At least in their eyes.:)

To depose PJ, SCO has to show that her evidence will have some effect on the outcome of the case. The best they can do is allege unclean hands on the part of IBM. Like the rest of SCO's case, this is very very shaky. The best they can show is one case where PJ 'might' (but probably not) have improperly received a document. On the other hand, SCO's actions were blatant. It's like a murderer accusing the cop that arrested him of jaywalking.

SCO is accusing PJ of receiving legal docs filed in the case from IBM. Weeeell, aside from the serious doubtfulness that this actually happened (GrokLaw has several volunteers who visit the courthouse and pick up hardcopies, which sometimes can even lack the usual court-clerk stamp - clerks being fallible humans too) the documents SCO mentions are not sealed, hence are PUBLIC RECORDS. Thus, there's no misconduct whatever involved in a party to the case giving non-sealed filings to a journalist, blogger, or passerby on the street. (Incidentally, journalists DO try to get early copies of such filings from the parties so they can be the first to report the news; this is completely legitimate for nonpriveleged material, as it becomes public record anyway.)

Now, when it comes to a party (SCO) allegedly giving SEALED material to a nonparty (Maureen O'Gara), that's another, entirely smellier, kettle of fish. That WOULD be improper.

also to depose PJ they would have had to1 file soupena papers with the court (to get those funny blue?? documents that are the official service media)2 email PJ to get her actual address3 have an actual person go to said location to say the Lines " Pamela Jones , this is a notice to appear please sign here"

1 2 and 3 have not happened so whatever reality TSCOG is in it ain't this one

Actually, the theory I've heard is that SCO wants to get its hands on the private (protected) documents belonging to IBM's lawyers.Normally, communication between a lawyer and their client is privileged. The other side can't see it and can't subpoena it, no matter how much they want to or how much it might help their case. You can admit being guilty as sin to your lawyer, and that admission will never be allowed to enter a court of law.

Thing is, the privilege only exists if that information stays strictly

I find it quite incredulous that someone can devote so much time to this cause

Much the same way that Ken Brown of AdTI had problems believing that Linux wasn't based on the
Minix codebase. In fact he had so much trouble that he went ahead and published even after
Andrew Tannenbaum (no great friend on Linus' in the past) uncategorically told him that
this was not the case [cs.vu.nl].

The thing is though, if you accept the notion of computer programmers (Linus, rms, and all the rest of them)
devoting all their spare time to creating a Free Software operating system, who do you find it so
strange that someone whose expertise lies in the legal sphere should devote her time to defending
the same?

There are people who can't program but who write documentation to support their favourite
free software projects. Must we assume they too are secretly funded by IBM?

Don't forget that after an analysis by a professional that Ken Brown hired told him there was ZERO evidence to support his claim that Linus stole code from Minix that he refused to believe her ( http://www.cs.vu.nl/~ast/brown/codecomparison/ [cs.vu.nl] ).

First, thank you for your well thought out reply. I couldn't have said it better myself.I would like to add that I wish that IBM would somehow subpoena the IPs and records from the SCOX Yahoo board, to expose the SCO Group corporate executives that were caught red-handed posting on their own company message board, pumping their own stock, and, in several cases, bragging about their "1300% return" on their initial investment. When quizzed about it by SLC Tribune writer Bob Mims, they flatly denied it, but fu

if you accept the notion of computer programmers (Linus, rms, and all the rest of them) devoting all their spare time to creating a Free Software operating system, who do you find it so strange that someone whose expertise lies in the legal sphere should devote her time to defending the same?

Also, one should never forget that people who are experts in a field have their own resources. I don't know about legal issues (IANAL, etc), but have taken a look at Ken Brown's diatribes and he seems to know nothing at all about operating systems.

Everything that Linus would have needed to create Linux from scratch is contained in a 150 pages book, "Fundamentals of Operating Systems", by A.M.Lister. I wrote a "toy" kernel myself in Basic for a simulated virtual machine, in the early 1980s, when I read that book. Unfortunately, the Tandy CoCo that I had at the time was too limited to run a real OS, although there were people running OS/9 on it.

All this is to say that I find Ken Brown's incredulity much more surprising than the fact that Linus wrote his kernel in spare time. Writing 10000 lines in a year? Heck, I once wrote 2000 lines in a week, tested, debugged and documented. Any programmer knows that for every "algorithm" line that you must ponder and twist and turn this and that way to make it work there are a hundred lines of "boiler plate" that you type automatically after a few years experience.

Therefore, I find it quite natural that someone who is as much interested in legal matters as I am interested in computers would be able to produce an amount of work in that field that would amaze me. Perhaps reading and analyzing a ten thousand pages legal brief would be as easy as writing a ten thousand lines program is for me, if I had the necessary interest, talent, and experience.

> Any programmer knows that for every "algorithm" line that you must ponder and twist and turn this and that> way to make it work there are a hundred lines of "boiler plate" that you type automatically after a few> years experience.Actually, in the Perl community, we call this "re-inventing the wheel" and encourage fledgeling programmers to stop doing it. Linux is written in C, of course, so your point is valid in the instance you were talking about. I merely wanted to point out that not *all* pr

It's almost as if you intentionally misunderstood the parent to get you language-choice statement posted.Are you saying that in Perl you never type "boiler" plate code? Isn't defining a new function or variable almost identical? ie: boilerplate?My understanding of the parent was that for most code, it doesn't really take much thought to type out the definitions or syntax. That becomes "automatic". Whereas the actual logic and design concepts take the majority of time.

Not in anything like the hundred-lines-at-a-time quantities the other poster was talking about.The closest I've ever come to doing that in Perl is writing the POD for a module, and that's documentation.

> Isn't defining a new function or variable almost identical?

Defining a new function is mostly about what the function does, so, no.

Defining lexical variables is pretty much the same every time, but we're talking here about *one* line.

Ok, I share your worry that it is difficult to bring up troubling questions without being labeled a Troll. I value discussion of all points of view.

However, PJ DID address the original suspicion in her first response.

She first stated simply and clearly "NO" "Wrong" "I Didn't"

Then she went into a lot of detail justifying the simple direct "addressing of the original suspicion" with what seems a very complete discussion of all the allegations. Such as IBM funding because of donating to Ibiblio and how a

Dear god, please, please stop using the word "incredulous" as though it were a synonym to "incredible." A person who has a hard time believing something is "incredulous"; the thing they have a hard time believing is "incredible."

The 'shy' bit, in my opinion, covers a multitude of feelings regarding having your online identity too-precisely connected to your meatspace identity. PJ doesn't have to be socially reluctant in order to not want everyone reading her web site to know real-life details about her, but if she is shy then that just makes these feelings more acute. For example, I am not shy, but I did once have a web site that became very popular for a time. It didn't feature a message board, per se, but I received massive amounts of email from readers, some of which I posted back to the site, etc. So there was a pretty large 'community,' and a certain fraction of that community wanted to know personal details about me. I always deflected these requests. As far as I am aware, none of the several hundred people trying to figure out who I was or what I was like in real life were successful.

Did I have a reason for keeping things 'secret' like that? Maybe not, but there is something unsettling about that kind of scrutiny, something you feel like you want to avoid. I don't blame PJ at all for keeping her real-life details mysterious. It makes a lot of sense to me.

The issue of shy could easily be addressed by legal council.Of course then there is a cost factor and all but PJ could effectively put all this to rest buy a competent legal council. First any and all question could be limited to the case they have made in courts to exclude any fishing expeditions. Second, any steps could be made to exclude anything that would identify her outside her on line life. Third, the judge could limit the submission of anything not already on record.

Look at sourceforge.net's 140,000 plus projects, all of which are maintained under some sort of open source license. Very few of them get funding of any sort to exist. Clearly there are lots of people out there who *do* spend much of their free time voluntarily putting stuff out into the community. Some do it to scratch an itch and others for fun. But just because *you* wouldn't be able to find the time to do this as a volunteer doesn't mean that it's impossible for others to do so.

The whole unclean hands bit actually holds up in court. If you had RTFA you'd see the rebuttal is that PJ has not reported on sealed documents or closed transcript hearings. Obvious SCO shills have.

It's hard to claim that the documents that are given out by IBM PR and the court (with court stamps, and volunteer's picking the crap up) is privileged. If you actually read Groklaw, that's nearly all that's reported (albeit, with a heavy dose of op-ed.)

And pointing at them and saying 'nyeh-nyeh you do it too' does nothing to address the original suspicion.

PJ didn't admit to doing any such thing from what I read, it was more like "nyeh-nyeh you are doing what you wrongly accused me of doing".

I find it quite incredulous that someone can devote so much time to this cause (not that I am on SCO's side). It will definitely answer things if PJ stand up to the allegations, but unfortunately or conveniently, she is 'shy'.

PJ has ruffled lots of feathers. Firstly, she's not a lawyer but a paralegal and this offends some people who seem to believe that only those who've passed the bar have the necessary mental acuity required to effectively navigate the morass of legalese found in the courtroom.

Secondly, lot's of people don't believe that PJ would devote so much time to supposed 'hobby' unless she is getting some kind of compensation. Well, I believe it. If someone is enjoying whatever they do, then that is often the reward

And TSG has alleged that nobody can write an OS kernel by his lonesome. TSG has alleged many, MANY things. They have even alleged that I, BMO, personally owe them $699 per CPU to run Linux. To date, none of their allegations were shown to have any weight. None, zero, nada, nil.PJ didn't need to fake an illness to duck a subpoena. This is the internet, isn't it?. She could be anywhere in the world and still run Groklaw. She could be sitting right next to me.

How long has this been going on? How many times has SCO amended or changed their claims completely? Even the judge commented at one point that they don't have any proof. And yet this continues. Is it normal in the US legal system to hold the parties in court indefinitely?

> Is it normal in the US legal system to hold the parties in court indefinitely?

Only if the defense can afford to keep a fleet of lawyers on the case indefinitely, and even then only if they also determine that they'd rather do that than give in and settle. IBM can and has, but this is not universally the case. Some court battles do actually end.

How long has this been going on? How many times has SCO amended or changed their claims completely? Even the judge commented at one point that they don't have any proof. And yet this continues. Is it normal in the US legal system to hold the parties in court indefinitely?

Short answer: The court system is always slow, but this case is taking at least twice as long as it normally would, for various reasons that all boil down to SCO not wanting to get to trial.

Long answer: It's not unusual for one of the parties in a court case to try to drag it out, so obviously it's the responsibility of the legal system to make sure that doesn't happen -- too much -- and the system is reasonably good at that. However, it's always the defendant who wants a long, drawn-out trial, in the hopes that by the time the court gets around to ruling the issue will have become moot. So, the legal system is designed to allow the plaintiff to drive the process forward, since the plaintiff is generally interested in getting a judgment ASAP.

In this case, however, it's the plaintiff who has been dragging his heels since the first day, because SCO never really wanted to be in court anyway, because they know they can't win. IBM's ability to drive the case forward is somewhat limited because of their position as the defendant, and anyway they seem more interested in making sure that SCO is crushed into molecule-thin paste than rushing things. The judges appear to have recognized quite some time ago what's going on, and their actions have been mixed. On the one hand, they don't want this thing on their dockets any longer than necessary, so they've been trying to define and follow strict schedules. On the other hand, they definitely don't want this thing coming back to them, and SCO is obviously going to appeal if they lose, so they also have a motivation to take their time and make the case appeal-proof. The best way to do that is to allow SCO lots of latitude, and SCO is quite happy to use every opportunity to slow things down.

Even worse, there are other cases involved here as well, including the Novell v SCO case, which is being heard by the same judges as SCO v IBM. Based on the various scheduling orders and when the judges finally decided to dig in their heels and refuse any more delays, SCO v IBM would be moving fast right now, probably just about ready to go in front of a jury, but the Novell v SCO case was filed last year. Since Novell v SCO will resolve many issues that apply to SCO v IBM, it makes sense to resolve them first. Not only that, but Novell's pushing hard for an early resolution (typical plaintiff behavior) because their claim is that SCO owes them lots of money and the more of it SCO spends fighting IBM, the less will be available to pay Novell. So, Judge Kimball made a decision that Novell v SCO should go first. Very sensible, except that Novell v SCO was just filed last year (or maybe late 2005?) and is still in heavy discovery. The discovery phase will be much shorter than SCO v IBM's was, largely because Novell is driving it hard, but it'll still take a year or so. In the meantime, SCO v IBM just has to wait.

It is perfectly normal for most of the civilized world to regard the US legal system as a cross between a Monty Python sketch and a Loony Tunes cartoon. This isn't, by any means, the longest-running court case. It's not even the longest-running tech court case. (The DR-DOS vs. Microsoft case ran for over a decade and the Microsoft antitrust case in the US was really just an extension of the Windows 95 illegal bundling case.)

Nor is US justice considered particularly competent, by many observers even in the

I don't think this case will ever end. Just when things start to move along, SCO comes up with something to stall the progress. I think that the legal action will end when SCO goes bankrupt. Period.

Novell, IBM, or somebody else will buy the UNIX IP rights (if Novell doesn't already have them) from the smoldering mass that was once the SCO Group and it'll be the end of it. If you currently have SCO stock, it'll be best to dump it right now before the impending impact. Unless the investors get smart and fir

Because OSDL, under an IBM Chairman, gave $50,000 of IBM-donated cash to "Groklaw" (i.e. PJ). That's their allegation, one which PJ has declined to deny or even comment on until, quote, she gets "lawyered up".

You may now commence troll rating me for wanting to discuss SCO's actual core allegation rather than a silly strawman adjunct.